Gemini 3.8 Flash vs DeepSeek V4.1 Flash: API price, context and cost per task
Google's newest Flash model against DeepSeek's V4.1 Flash - two budget models with roughly 1M-token windows.
On output, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is 7.3x cheaper ($0.567 vs $4.13 per million tokens). On input, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is 16x cheaper ($0.051 vs $0.825 per million tokens).
Data updated 2026-11-11 - source: public OpenRouter model list, refreshed daily. Prices in USD, excluding VAT.
Specs and prices side by side
| Gemini 3.8 Flash | DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | DeepSeek | |
| Input, per 1M tokens | $0.825 | $0.051 |
| Output, per 1M tokens | $4.13 | $0.567 |
| Cached input, per 1M | $0.0825 | $0.018 |
| Batch (input / output) | $0.375 / $1.88 | $0.112 / $0.336 |
| Context window | 1,048,576 | 1,048,576 |
| Max output | 65,536 | 943,718 |
| Input types | text, images, files, audio, video | text, images |
| Reasoning | Yes | Yes |
| Tool calling | Yes | Yes |
| On OpenRouter since | 2 Sep 2026 | 10 Sep 2026 |
Highlighted: the cheaper price or the larger limit. "Not published" means the figure is not in the public model listing yet.
What a month of work costs
Four typical workloads at today's list prices. Reasoning models also bill their thinking as output tokens, so treat output-heavy numbers as a floor.
| Workload | Gemini 3.8 Flash | DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Support chatbot10,000 conversations a month, about 1,500 input and 400 output tokens each | $28.88 | $3.03 | DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 9.5x cheaper |
| Coding agent300 tasks a month, about 80,000 input tokens (code context re-read across steps) and 8,000 output tokens each | $29.70 | $2.58 | DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 11x cheaper |
| Coding agent with caching70% of input served from the prompt cache | $17.23 | $2.03 | |
| Long-document analysis1,000 documents a month, about 50,000 tokens in and a 1,500-token summary out | $47.44 | $3.40 | DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 14x cheaper |
| Content drafting600 articles a month, about 3,000 tokens of brief in and 2,500 tokens of draft out | $7.67 | $0.942 | DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 8.1x cheaper |
Price stability over the last 30 days
- Gemini 3.8 Flash: 1 price change since 12 Oct 2026. Input ranged $0.75 - $0.825, output $3.75 - $4.13 per million tokens.
- DeepSeek V4.1 Flash: 14 price changes since 12 Oct 2026. Input ranged $0.0137 - $0.3, output $0.0112 - $1.2 per million tokens. Volatile: the listed price follows whichever provider OpenRouter currently routes to, so budget with the upper end of the range.
Gemini 3.8 Flash: price log
| Date | Input | Output |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-16 | $0.825 | $4.13 |
| 2026-09-08 | $0.75 | $3.75 |
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash: price log
| Date | Input | Output |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-11-07 | $0.051 | $0.567 |
| 2026-10-29 | $0.045 | $0.5 |
| 2026-10-27 | $0.14 | $0.42 |
| 2026-10-24 | $0.02 | $1 |
| 2026-10-23 | $0.165 | $0.66 |
| 2026-10-22 | $0.3 | $1.2 |
| 2026-10-21 | $0.049 | $0.525 |
| 2026-10-20 | $0.0352 | $0.0112 |
What the vendors and benchmarks say
Gemini 3.8 Flash
"Gemini 3.8 Flash is Google's most intelligent Flash model with significant gains from 3.7 Flash across software engineering, agentic tasks, and multi-step reasoning."model card on OpenRouter
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash
"DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is a sparse mixture-of-experts model from DeepSeek, and the first built on the company's Causal Encoder-Decoder (CED) architecture."model card on OpenRouter
Which one to pick
Gemini 3.8 Flash costs more but has a steady price and audio and video input. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is far cheaper on input and has a much larger output limit, but its price on OpenRouter is volatile. For multimodal pipelines, Gemini; for text-heavy bulk jobs, DeepSeek.
Related reading
More comparisons
How we calculate
Prices are the public per-token list rates from OpenRouter's model list, which match the vendors' own API prices for first-party models and show the current routed price for open-weight models served by several hosts. Monthly costs multiply those rates by the token volumes in each workload; caching assumes the stated share of input is billed at the cached-input rate. Benchmarks and claims are quoted from the named sources, mostly the vendors themselves - treat them as a guide and test on your own tasks. See also the AI cost calculator and all tracked model prices.
Frequently asked questions
Which is cheaper, Gemini 3.8 Flash or DeepSeek V4.1 Flash?
As of 11 Nov 2026, Gemini 3.8 Flash costs $0.825 per million input tokens and $4.13 per million output tokens; DeepSeek V4.1 Flash costs $0.051 and $0.567. Gemini 3.8 Flash is cheaper in 0 of the 4 monthly workloads we price on this page. The real bill also depends on how many reasoning tokens each model writes.
Which has the larger context window?
Gemini 3.8 Flash reads up to 1,048,576 tokens and can write up to 65,536; DeepSeek V4.1 Flash reads up to 1,048,576 and writes up to 943,718.
How much does a support chatbot cost on each model?
For 10,000 conversations a month (about 15 million input and 4 million output tokens) you would pay about $28.88 on Gemini 3.8 Flash and $3.03 on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash at list prices, before any caching or batch discounts.
Do they offer prompt caching or batch discounts?
Gemini 3.8 Flash lists cached input at $0.0825 per million and a batch rate of $0.375 / $1.88. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash lists cached input at $0.018 per million and a batch rate of $0.112 / $0.336. Caching matters most for agents and chatbots that resend the same context on every turn.
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